I've worn out the newsgroups...

Yes, it's official: I've posted too many answers to the newsgroups in the past 9 years.

They blacklisted me! No, just kidding (I hope). I'm not sure what is going on, but the reason for me being really quiet on the newsgroups is because my posts seem to be blocked by the NNTP server...

If I try to post using any newsreader (I use Thunderbird but also tried Agent) my posts get sent correctly but never appear on the server. If I try to post using the web front-end on microsoft.com, my posts do show up on the web front-end but again never make it to the NNTP server (so they are not being propagated to my (and your) newsreader and also don't appear in Google's Group archive/DejaNews). I've even tried the shadowing news server of my ISP provider. My posts do show up on the news server of my provider, but again don't make it to the news.microsoft.com server.

And since nobody is responding to my posts I can only conclude nobody is actually using the web front-end on microsoft.com, well, except for this user (because he responded to my post, yeah!):Parallel port interrupt

So it all points to me being blacklisted... Maybe there's a spam rule: "if [user's post count] > 10000; "it must be a spambot; block it!"

Microsoft is looking into it, so hopefully I'm back soon...

If you have seen the same behavior or may know what's going on, please leave a comment or send me an email (through the contact form on this site)

UPDATE: It indeed seems to be a spam filter thing. I tried changing my email address but that didn't seem to help. Then I tried changing my "Display Name" as well and now I can post again. If you find yourself unable to post; change both your email address (you don't want to use your real email address on NG's anyway because of email-harvester-bots) and your display name and you should be good to go again!

Comments

If you suspect some anti-spam filter that mistakenly filters out your messages you may try to change your name and e-mail address and post a reply.
If that post reaches the server it may really a kind of filter applied on your account.

Google groups has an interface to post to newsgroups, you may try to find it in the new (terrible) google groups site and use it in the meantime.

I think I'm actually filtered on my display name! I already tried changing my email address but that didn't seem to do it. Now I changed my display name and voila! Thanks for the suggestion, it made me try something else!